Charles Hatfield on The Playwright

Billed as a comedy about “the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man,” The Playwright is an austere book about an austere life: a life lived at a remove, so to speak, one of productive loneliness, sexlessness, distance, and disconnection. As if to match, the book is narrated in a kind of arid, emotionless third person, and the main characters lack names. There are no balloons, only boxed captions. You can feel the chill.